In 1947, Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers to become the first American of black African descent to play Major League baseball, breaking professional baseball’s self-imposed “color line.” The famous Robinson is rightly considered an American hero. But there was another 1947 black hero who, unfortunately, was historically overshadowed by…

In criticizing his state’s proposed tax credit-based school voucher program, called the “Opportunity Scholarship Act,” former New Jersey governor James J. Florio writes: “You don’t have to be an economist to understand that [education] tax credits are tax expenditures and, thus, revenues lost to be made up by someone else.”…

Like many states, New Jersey has been grappling with the issue of teacher tenure in its government schools. Now, a major tenure reform bill sponsored by State Sen. Teresa Ruiz (D) is gaining steam in the state legislature. It would restructure tenure around a “teacher effectiveness and evaluation” procedure focussed…

A proposed New Jersey law would revise the state’s surrogate parenting laws to legalize a new type of surrogacy, called “gestational surrogacy.” A state senate committee report on the New Jersey Gestational Carrier Agreement Act explains: A gestational carrier agreement is a written contract pursuant to which a woman agrees…

Louisiana has passed a bill establishing in the state the broadest school voucher system in America to date. Under the plan, all of Louisiana’s school children are eligible for full or partial state-issued private school tuition vouchers up to $8,800, the current annual per-pupil cost of the state’s government-run schools.…

Marc A. Thiessen recently noted that American “liberals” strongly support President Obama’s counterterrorism policies even though his policies are almost indistinguishable from President Bush’s, which liberals hated. But what Thiesson dubbed the “Obama-Bush Doctrine” is just an indication of the likeness of these two presidents. If liberals were to take…

A new study has announced a major advance in the battle against cancer. Seth Augenstein reports: In a study published [May 14, 2012] in the journal Cancer Cell, four scientists from the Cancer Institute of New Jersey and the Institute for Advanced Study laid out their work involving a compound…

Many New Jersey parents were recently shocked to learn that their state’s standardized student test contained a question asking students “to reveal a secret about their lives [and] explain why it was hard to keep.” Child psychologist Dr. Steven Tobias said: A question like this is really fraught with problems –…

Dharun Ravi, the defendant in the “Hate Crime” case I wrote about in March, has been sentenced to 30 days in county jail, plus probation, community service, and various fines. Many were shocked and disappointed by this “lenient” sentence, including the prosecution, who vowed to appeal. But, as the New…

The Library of Economics and Liberty offers an insightful study by Linda Gorman on the history and causes of the declining quality of education in America. The report covers a lot of ground and demonstrates, among other things, the wasteful destructiveness of tax-funded education. At the K-12 level in America, for…

A virulent epidemic is violating American’s rights and sapping the U.S. economy: occupational licensure. The statistics are astounding. According to Forbes’ Suzanne Hoppough, from 1960 to 2007 the percentage of U.S. workers belonging to a licensed profession rose from 4.5 percent to 28 percent. In all, writes Hoppough, occupations requiring…

In a recent post, a reader commented: Even without a national healthcare plan the old person is taking a finite amount of time away from the possibility of the doctor working on a younger patient. Therefore rationing is inevitable in any system. Rationing has to take place. It is only…

Texas chemical maker Celanese has developed a technology to make ethanol from natural gas and coal, both plentiful in America, and is building plants in Texas and China to manufacture it. “If it works,” notes Forbes columnist Christopher Helman, it “will revolutionize the fuel industry.” Great news? Yes—but maybe only for…

The Democrats, having made so-called “fairness” a key campaign issue in this year’s election, engineered a symbolic Senate vote on the so-called “Buffet Rule”—a special, higher income tax rate on the “rich.” As expected, it was defeated. But the Democrats’ assault on the rich is not mere political gamesmanship. It is…

In 1984, then-Colorado Governor Dick Lamm infamously said, “We've got a duty to die and get out of the way with all of our machines and artificial hearts and everything else like that and let the other society, our kids, build a reasonable life.” Though Lamm has long claimed that he…